Modern Marketing.

Welcome to Issue 207 of Total Annarchy, a fortnightly newsletter by me, Ann Handley, with a focus on writing, marketing, living your best life. Was this email forwarded to you? You can subscribe here.

Hi, Noodlebean.

Three things bouncing around my noggin this week:

1. An on-point question from a reader about whether content is "working" if it's not delivering obvious leads—and how to manage that tension with that one sales guy.
    
2. The unexpected creative lesson Conan O'Brien gave me. We aren't actually friends, but I like to think we might be.
    
3. And finally: True crime.

(P.S. And an update on Dot.)

* * *

I run our LinkedIn newsletter of roughly 3K readers for a financial technology company. Our Sales Manager worries it's not pulling in enough leads, especially enterprise ones, and wants to ditch it in favor of bottom-funnel content. I see value in building long-term trust and our own list through the newsletter. I could use your perspective: What should I focus on if I want a newsletter to resonate with the right audience? —Kate

The tension you're describing isn't really about the newsletter. It's about two wildly different definitions of what's "working" in your marketing.

The Sales Manager is measuring with leads as the metric.

You're measuring with trust as the metric.

Neither of you is wrong. But you're not having the same conversation. It's the old blind-men-and-the-elephant problem: One of you has hold of the trunk, the other the tail, another an ear... and so on. Each is adamant they've got the whole story.

A few thoughts for you and the Sales Manager, who in my head I've now named Steve. (For no reason other than he seems like a Steve.)

Start with the newsletter's actual job. A newsletter is like a border collie: It needs a job or it's just racing around your strategy deck, barking at random metrics.

Its job is not to say, "We cover fintech." Its job is to help one specific reader think through a specific kind of problem.

So in financial services technology, step away from the broad topic bucket:

NOT THIS: payments, platforms, the magic and wonders of fintech

YES THIS: feelings—meaning the anxiety, decision, or ambition your reader carries into work on a regular Tuesday

Maybe that's:

• What keeps them up the night before a board meeting
• What decision they're worried about getting wrong
• What pressure lands on their shoulders every quarter

Step into their shoes. Slip on their skin. Feel what they feel. (You toss the border collie a biscuit. He spins with joy.)

The goal is that tiny electric moment when a reader pumps their fist in the air and screams inside their head: YES. This is exactly how it feels for me.

And the more precisely you write to someone, the more the wrong someones opt out. Godspeed, Wrong-someones. Self-selection is good in B2B Marketing.

(Quick aside on unsubscribes, because marketers can get weirdly tender about them—and I used to, too: Let them leave. It's better they leave than linger on your list like zombies—dead-eyed, shambling around, clicking nothing, wanting nothing. Not everyone is your person. That's perfectly fine.)

Back to Steve.

Steve wants enterprise buyers. Fair enough, Steve.

But here's the secret about the magical and elusive unicorn called the enterprise buyer: They rarely convert cold from bottom-funnel content.

They research slowly. They trust slowly. They buy slowly. A newsletter that builds familiarity over six months is doing work that a cold demo offer simply won't get the chance to do.

So what's missing here isn't the newsletter. It's the explicit connection between what the newsletter builds—trust, familiarity, credibility—and what the business eventually wants: pipeline.

Which means that if you want the newsletter to pull real strategic weight as it herds prospects like a border collie all over the internet... you need two things:

1. A clearer editorial through-line—a point of view readers come to associate with your brand
    
2. A better picture of who is reading—not just how many

Because 3,000 readers who are CFOs at mid-market companies is an entirely different asset than 30,000 random LinkedIn subscribers.

The newsletter isn't the problem.

You and Steve both need the patience to let that connection materialize.

Related: Should You Publish a LinkedIn Newsletter or a Traditional Newsletter? Or both?

MORE THIS WEEK

Insights From Conan. We're all told to write for the audience. But what if that's only half the story?

I've been thinking about that ever since a Conan O'Brien joke at the Oscars—and it leads to somewhere interesting about AI and first drafts.

True crime: Did you get this email? Someone is pretending to be me, but getting it all wrong. The biggest tell: the sign-off... and ZERO em dashes?!

DEPARTMENT OF SHENANIGANS

Font choice matters, people.

P.S. Update on Dot: Dot is a ladybug spending the winter in my upstairs bathroom. Here's the backstory.

One rare 60-degree day recently, Dot threw a party. Two more ladybugs showed up (Pip and Nib). From where...? I had no idea.

Then two more (Dash and F. Spot Fitzgerald). By night the temperature dropped again; the celebration was over. The other four disappeared as mysteriously as they'd materialized, and Dot went back to being a solo traveler.

Ann Handley is the author of Everybody Writes and other books. 

SPECIAL THANKS to AWeber for being the provider of choice for Total Annarchy. 
If you are looking to up your email game, I highly recommend.